Thirty-one-year-old Native American man Moses Alex John was born on November 25 1945 in Alaska and was living in Cudahy, Los Angeles County, California, when he was killed in the early hours of August 10 1977. He died from multiple stab wounds inflicted inside a friend’s apartment, becoming one of two Indigenous men slain in the attack.
On the night of August 9 1977, recently escaped Sioux-Assiniboine convict James Allen Red Dog and his companion Raymond Tapaha met 31-year-old Native American man Moses Alex John and fellow Native American man Stanley Large Jr. in a Los Angeles bar. After the victims generously offered them a place to stay, the visitors bound the sleeping hosts with tape and rope, then repeatedly stabbed them, killing both Indigenous men where they lay.
The same assault scene showed signs of further violence: 31-year-old Native American man Moses Alex John and Stanley Large Jr. were left dead while a third guest, Levi Aragon, was kidnapped and sexually assaulted as the attackers fled. Investigators later reconstructed that the murders were entirely unprovoked and executed while the victims were helplessly restrained.
James Allen Red Dog and Raymond Tapaha were captured soon afterward. On April 10 1978, Red Dog—then 24—pleaded guilty in Los Angeles Superior Court to two counts of second-degree murder for killing 31-year-old Native American man Moses Alex John and Stanley Large Jr.; the sentence was set to run concurrently with an existing federal robbery term. Tapaha faced related murder and sexual-assault charges for the same incident. No other suspects were ever identified, and authorities closed the homicide once the pair were convicted.
The California convictions for murdering 31-year-old Native American man Moses Alex John later served as aggravating factors when Red Dog was tried for a 1991 Delaware homicide; he was ultimately executed by lethal injection in 1993. With Red Dog’s death, and Tapaha long since prosecuted, law-enforcement agencies consider the case fully resolved, leaving Moses Alex John remembered as a Native American victim whose life ended violently at age 31.
